Triburbia

(Harper; 253 pages; $25.99)

The pleasures of Karl Taro Greenfeld's writing are easy to catalog - a crystalline, terrifically readable prose style; a vast repository of trenchant observations; and a caustic sense of humor that recalls Jonathan Franzen yet with a refreshing economy of speech. But it's somewhat harder to immediately identify why this author's smart, intricate debut novel, "Triburbia," which maps the intersecting lives of couples and families in trendy, affluent Lower Manhattan, doesn't seem to achieve the dramatic impact that it initially promises.

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The difficulty, if that's what we should really call it, stems from the novel's early sections, particularly the opener in which a group of elementary school dads in their 30s, who meet regularly for breakfast, argue about a recent sexual assault in their neighborhood. One of the dads, a cynical sound engineer named Mark, bears an uncanny resemblance to a seemingly ubiquitous police sketch of the offender.

As Mark frets about what might happen if he finds himself actually accused of the crime, one suspects that Greenfeld is probably setting the reader up for a Tom Perrotta-style satire of upper-middle-class paranoia crossed with Martin Scorsese's "After Hours," in which a mob of downtowners stalks hapless Griffin Dunne, whom they suspect of murder.

But just as this mistaken-identity plot begins to gain traction, Greenfeld abruptly relegates it to the background and shifts to another story - this one about Barnaby, a disabled photographer, whose life is still affected by a tragic car accident that occurred when he was in high school.

Barnaby's story offers some lovely, poignant moments. But then, Greenfeld shifts again, now to Brooke, who is sound engineer Mark's promiscuous, pot-smoking, photo-editor wife, at which point the reader begins to understand that the author has something different and ultimately far more intelligent in mind than a single, straightforward narrative.

For "Triburbia" turns out to be less an urban version of Perrotta's "Little Children" than a savagely satirical, hipster take on "Our Town" or Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," telling the story of a neighborhood via a chorus of voices, in this case the Tribeca dads and those closely related to them.

"They were pulled together by coincidence, having children roughly the same age in the same school," Greenfeld writes of the dads. "They felt some kinship because of who they weren't - they weren't attorneys or bankers or hedge fund runners as were so many of the new fathers just moving into Tribeca."

Over the course of "Triburbia," we meet a philandering sculptor having an affair with a French woman who is cheating on her Italian chef husband; we meet the ribald, antiestablishment punk puppeteer who briefly falls for a PBS children's performer before marrying a socially conscious worker in the nonprofit sector; the profane and possibly mob-connected Jewish contractor who finds his tough-guy street cred insufficient for protecting his 9-year-old girl, Amber, from the vicious, mean-girl tactics of Mark and Brooke's queen bee daughter; the long-past-his-shelf-date Jewish playwright Levi-Levy, who is estranged from his literary agent wife, Charmaine, and who winds up schtupping Brooke; the punk puppeteer's financially challenged teenage daughter Sadie, who works as Mark and Brooke's nanny and conspires to use sex to get Mark to pay for her college education; and also, the discredited fake memoirist who, James Frey-style, finds even greater success after he has been outed as a fraud.

Some of these vignettes are more compelling than others, but each is replete with witty lines and often right-on-the-money social commentary. "It turned out," Greenfeld writes toward the end of his novel as the Great Recession approaches, "for all their bohemian airs, as a community they were more dependent on Wall Street, more defined by the financial services, than they cared to admit. If those bankers, whom Mark had always skirted in the playground at drop-off, were really going bust, then there went the whole neighborhood."

Greenfeld, who has lived in Tribeca, doesn't appear to have cared much for many of his neighbors, but he knows them intimately. He knows their sexual peccadilloes, their conspicuous ganja consumption, their jaw-droppingly hypocritical materialism and elitism, their malicious gossip, their all-too-fleeting moments of kindness, their sometimes-embarrassing lack of awareness. And he knows their inflated sense of their own importance, which, in some way, provides Greenfeld's sneakiest and most devastating critique as one realizes that the author's seeming failure to traditionally tie up his plots might actually be part of his overall narrative strategy.

By novel's end, a long-anticipated confrontation between cheating spouses never materializes, the fake memoirist doesn't really get his comeuppance and, as for that story of the sex offender, well, it fades away too, and along with it so do Mark's fantasies about defending himself against false accusations.

Greenfeld refuses to indulge his characters' fondness for histrionics and self-mythology by granting them dramatic climaxes or phony resolutions. Despite their posh trappings and their wealth, in Karl Taro Greenfeld's world, they are ultimately just people, and Tribeca is no different from anywhere else.

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